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Wenstrup vote upsets conservatives

WASHINGTON – Some Cincinnati-area conservatives are steaming mad that the city’s two Republican lawmakers didn’t support a rebellion aimed at ousting Speaker John Boehner from his post as House GOP leader.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Columbia-Tusculum, seems to be taking the most heat after he rebuffed calls from tea party groups to vote against Boehner, his home-state neighbor and political friend.

“His vote was a mistake prompted by his lack of understanding,” Howard Hines, chairman of the Clermont County Republican Party’s Central Committee, wrote in a Facebook post after the vote. “His constituents, myself included, will be training him in the coming weeks and months. He will learn and come to understand, or he will be voted out of office in 2016.”

That “training” apparently includes a class on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which Hines said he persuaded Wenstrup to take with him.

Hines declined to be interviewed for this story. But he’s not the only conservative up in arms that Boehner won the support of Ohio’s GOP congressional delegation.

“There are a lot of people very upset” at Wenstrup and Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Westwood, said George Brunemann, a Cincinnati tea party activist.

Brunemann doesn’t share the outrage — saying there was nothing to be gained from the revolt against Boehner. But he said there’s a broad sentiment among Ohio tea partyers that Wenstrup and others “turned their back on us” with their support for Boehner.

Wenstrup and Chabot strongly defended their support for Boehner. They said there was not a viable opponent challenging Boehner and unseating him would have been divisive and unproductive.

Boehner won a third term as speaker on Jan. 6 after a dramatic roll call vote on the House floor last week. Just before the election, three Republicans jumped into the race to challenge the Ohio congressman: Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert, of Texas, and Ted Yoho and Daniel Webster, of Florida.

In the end, 25 Republicans did not support Boehner, and the West Chester Republican emerged bruised but not beaten. Now other Republicans are nursing their post-vote wounds.

“We did get a lot of calls from folks who were urging us to not support the speaker,” Chabot said.

He said some of it might have been orchestrated by outside groups, rather than genuine grass-roots opposition from the district.

In any case, Chabot said, he decided Republicans “needed to stick together,” not highlight their divisions as the new Congress gets underway.

Boehner is “more likely to unite us (against) Obama’s liberal agenda than anybody else,” Chabot said. “It wouldn’t make any sense for me to throw that all overboard and to go after somebody else who is untried and unproven and untested.”

Like Chabot, Wenstrup said his office also received a flood of calls before the vote from constituents who were “frustrated” and saying “we want something different.”

But Wenstrup said the three Republicans who ran against Boehner joined the fray at the last minute and didn’t convince him that they were serious.

“None of them came to me at any time to discuss what their platform would look like (or) why they wanted to run,” Wenstrup said. “I just didn’t feel it would be responsible to vote for someone who wasn’t making their case.”

It was clear before the vote that Wenstrup was under pressure to vote against his fellow Ohio Republican. The day before the vote, Wenstrup took the unusual step of issuing a 16-paragraph statement explaining and justifying his support for Boehner.

“When we are divided, liberals see opportunity,” Wenstrup said in that statement.

Wenstrup downplayed the fallout from Cincinnati conservatives, saying it was all part of the give-and-take between a congressman and his constituents.

Wenstrup said he might accede to Hines’ request to take a class on the Constitution.

“I said (to Hines), ‘If I have the time, I’d be willing to sit in,’ ” Wenstrup said. “It can only behoove me to spend time with my constituents.”